Someone recently asked why I write science fiction and fantasy. I believe the question went something like, For what? As if writing science fiction and fantasy was a degradation, a waste of time, or, at the very least, certainly not literature, definitely not art. So what was the point?

This question was not asked at Indigenous Comic Con, a 3-day event celebrating the Indigenous creators in popular culture. It was not asked by the comic book artists reimagining their cultural stories as superhero stories. It was not asked by the families crowding into the theater to watch Star Wars dubbed into the Navajo language. It certainly wasn’t asked by all the cosplayers dressed as their favorite science fiction and fantasy characters. Everyone there inherently understood why...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
Powell's has a massive selection of used books and I'm one of the people who buys them in. I look through what customers bring to sell and decide what to purchase based on sales history, stock numbers, and relevance. It's a mixture of data analysis, trend prediction, and general industry knowledge. I'm also on our inventory team, which means I often see the books I've bought multiple times as they make their way through our sorting carts and onto the shelves.

Last book you loved:
By the time this post is published, my answer will have changed! Between our overstuffed shelves and the advance copies we get from publishers, I'm lucky enough to have a never-ending supply of reading material...

Firstly, I don’t sleep much anymore. A year ago sleep left me. I’ve spent the year in a complex postmortem of the sort that often follows a relationship breakup. What did I do to make it leave? What can I do to get it back? Is it possible to learn to survive without it? A year of counseling, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, mindfulness, CBT, meditation, supplements, drugs, and general earnest searching has left my questions with the following answers, respectively: Unclear. Unclear. No.

The two or three years prior to that I’d been working on a novel set in the late middle ages, whose genesis was confession — confession of the Catholic sort that happens in a booth, a little dark box. I’m not a Catholic and have never confessed, but I’m drawn to the idea of this little dark box...

John Boyne has enjoyed a successful writing career that began in his early 20s, and now, nearly 20 years later, boasts 11 adult novels and 5 young adult novels, most notably The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It is perhaps this breadth of experience that inspired him to turn a black mirror on ambition and the publishing world. The result is a darkly comic novel centered on Maurice Swift, a ruthlessly ambitious — yet curiously talentless — writer who will stop at nothing in his quest for admiration and fame. The Observer remarks that “in Maurice Swift, Boyne has given us an unforgettable protagonist, dangerous and irresistible in equal measure. The result is an ingeniously conceived novel that confirms Boyne as one of the most assured writers of his generation.”...

On December 28, 2016, just weeks before he left office, President Obama signed the proclamation creating the Bears Ears National Monument. The creation of this 1.5 million-acre monument in the southeastern corner of Utah represented the culmination of years of work by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a grassroots group composed of representatives of five different Native nations in the Southwest. Working together as never before, the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and two Ute tribes who collectively share an ancient and cherished history in this rugged landscape preserved an area that includes more than 100,000 archaeological and sacred sites and attests to more than 10,000 years of human habitation in this part of the world. Bears Ears, named for the twin buttes that are shaped like bears’ ears, has been a literal nursery of Indigenous nations, distinct in language and culture. A year later, on December 4, 2017, President Trump reduced the size of the monument by 85 percent...

My entire childhood library was overflowing with stories about little kids whose parents had died or were assholes. Anne of Green Gables, Matilda, Pippi Longstocking, even Harriet the Spy had absent dickhole parents. At the time, I LOVED THIS. As someone who raised herself, loved loved loved words, and deeply needed to feel seen amidst the competing backdrops of perfect families I couldn’t relate to, it was unbelievably healing to find solace in those books.

As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve started to find the genre kind of objectively bizarre...

The Line Hotel in Austin is new. It’s in previews. The restaurant is operated by my favorite winner of Top Chef. The entire city is drinking bottled water. I used bottled water to brush my teeth this morning. I have a craving for a Slurpee. I haven’t had a Slurpee in like seven hundred years. The streets are lousy with Bird scooters and Lime scooters and another kind I don’t remember. I’m texting with Tommy about meeting up on Halloween. I’m texting with Anastacia about meeting up tonight for karaoke. My dad has been meditating. He sends me an email with his fondest memory of us. It’s us camping. Us “camping” was putting a mattress in the front yard and eating candy and looking at the stars...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
I take the pallets of new books that we get each week from various publishers and distributors, and I scan each book to make sure it’s not damaged, confirm that what we’ve gotten is what we ordered, and mark it into inventory. Then, at the end of each day, my coworkers and I put all of the received books onto carts and send them to the stores for purchase.

Last book you loved:The Hunger by Alma Katsu. It is an incredibly engaging, character-focused, historical fiction and horror novel that I couldn’t put down.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
From a very early age my face was either in a book, or my head was in the clouds...

The confluence of political events over the past few years, from the international to the municipal, is eating away not just at the fabric of our society, but at our humanity and emotional wellness. That is to say, the current political climate has been good for the therapy business, though I don’t know a single therapist who is happy about this. I mean, there’s so much normal human tragedy to address that the need for therapeutic support isn’t going away any time soon.

My clients are hurting. I’m hurting. We’re all trying to figure out what “better” looks like when we have so little control over world events. This means that when clients come to me, expressing fear and vulnerability, I have to be brave enough to match their fear and vulnerability with my own while providing safety and comfort...

It is a cliché among the thoughtful class — the English majors, the publishing house interns, the baristas who write nonfiction essays with law school applications in their desk drawers like a depressing emergency eject button — to say that we found our True Home in a bookstore. It was there, we say, where we understood the world was immensely vaster than the confines of our childhood homes, by which we usually mean the discovery of other kinds of lives, far more interesting than our own; and also sex. But today, I rise in opposition: Get out of the bookstore. Go outside. Go for a run.

When I was a young man, bookstores were more important to me than toy stores, even more than libraries, because anything I saw in a bookstore could be mine, forever...